updated 07:20 pm EDT, Mon April 5, 2010

HP tablet to have short life but 1080p

The HP slate's battery will last half as long as the iPad's, a leaked presentation showed on Monday. Since it will use a year-old 1.6GHz Atom processor, the Windows 7 tablet will run for five hours where the ARM-powered Apple device will last for at least 10 hours. The edge, Engadget has learned, would come even despite the HP tablet's smaller and lower resolution 8.9-inch, 1024x600 screen.

Cost would also be an issue. An HP slate should cost less for 32GB of storage, at $549 versus $599, but Apple will still carry the price advantage at $499. A 64GB HP model would be the best value at $599.

Most of HP's advantage should come from expansion and limited HD support. The slate should have the same Broadcom Crystal HD video decoder as some netbooks and will support decoding 1080p video, but will be incapable of modern 3D gaming. It should have a single USB port but will also carry an SDXC card reader, HDMI, a 3-megapixel back camera and a VGA front camera for video chats. Pen support is cited as an advantage, although the iPad can support capacitive touch pens of its own.

HP's device would also carry the same 1.5-pound weight in spite of its smaller frame.

The revelations show that HP fully intends to target the iPad when the slate eventually ships but that the hardware will struggle to compete against similarly priced netbooks. An ASUS Eee PC T101MT is thicker and heavier but also costs $40 less while using a larger screen, a modern Atom processor and longer battery life.

Twice the Spec

All HP has to do is double up on the Spec Feature count. Actually add more stuff, like "on, off, standby toggle switch" and "five USB ports" and "SVGA/VGA/HDMI/SVideo/Composite" and "Dual Removable Battery Bay" and "BR/DVD/CD/R-RW/DL Drive" and "three cameras" and "Stereo Speakers w/Subwoofer" and "Slide Out Ultra Thin Keyboard" and "Infrared/RF/BT/WiFi/3G/Wimax/4G" and "HD added on all features". Yeah I think that will do it. People will forget the silly 3 hours max ( if your luck ) run time.

slated for the trash before it ships

Surprising

Year-old and (despite the higher rating) probably slower chip ... lower rez ... half the battery ... not a dedicated touchscreen OS ... for (essentially) the same price? Where do I sign up? :)

Just kidding, but seriously this no longer seems like much of a threat. For all the people here and elsewhere who said they weren't going to buy a Gen-1 iPad, this thing screams "will be replaced by something better in six months" at least TWICE as loudly.

The iPad

appears to have the upper hand with battery life, screen size and price point. But the HP Slate does have some advantages - memory expansion, USB, camera... And you should be able to tether this device to your phone (a huge plus).

The question is, what will the average user find more useful to them? Only time will tell.

Yup, definitely for geeks by geeks...

Those damn geeks always want a 100-blade Swiss Army knife of features just to show how cool it looks with all the blades out even if none of the blades work well. No matter. The main competition of the HP Slate will be the Windows netbooks because they're cheaper and have a physical keyboard. I know they're saying that HP Slate will have five hours battery life, but I think it will be hard pressed to get that much battery life. I hear that Windows 7 multitouch is pretty good, but I wonder how many programs there will be to exploit it.

The HP Slate is still going to need digital content on it and hopefully HP is lining up content publishers. In theory, the HP Slate should be a halfway decent product, but I can't see anyone giving up their netbooks for it.

Businesses

Regardless of the comparatively laughable nature of the specs, there is still going to be a big market in businesses for Windows tablets. If you have a lot of line-of-business apps written in .NET or VB, you are not going to hire in or retrain people to rewrite and maintain on another platform.

HP's lack of features

The HP is so much crappier than other Netbooks.

1. Lack of USB ports. It has only one for God's sake. We want three.
2. 5-hour if you're lucky run time. We want 10 hours.
3. Lack of a real keyboard. It should have had a sliding keyboard.
4. Lack of a real hard drive. It should have room for a 1 GB hard drive, not the puny 64 GB one.
5. Why the small screen size? It should have had a real HD screen.
6. It's heavy. Why why why?
7. It's expensive. Come on. There are netbooks a whole lot cheaper than the HP - with a keyboard.

It seems to be a real tweener. Something no body has any use for.
It doesn't have enough features for everyone.

Yesterdays technology arrives tomorrow

I would suspect that the only people who would be interested would be tablet fanatics with seriously anti Apple dna and a good pair of rose coloured glasses. Some of those about certainly, but surely not enough to make this product pay its way or gain traction.

Is Late, Is lame, Is a hog

Here it comes

magining being a fly on the wall at an HP planning meeting:

HP Exec. 1: Apple's announcement is coming next week and it's a real product!
HP Exec. 2: Relax. I know you're new, so here's the deal: Ballmer will trot out a mockup, flash it around onstage briefly, and describe it very nebulously while we wait for Apple's demo, specs and features. Then, we'll identify what we think are weak spots and throw them all into our device. Blind 'em with spec lists, as usual. You and I know that Apple has carefully considered every port, option, and millimeter; Apple's software is designed expressly for the device and ours will be off-the-shelf, shoehorned in, but our customers don't understand that. iMac didn't have a floppy, but ours did... Uh, maybe that's a bad example, sales-wise. Anyway, if they don't have a camera, we'll give 'em two. If they don't have a USB port, we'll throw one on. If they don't have a stylus, we'll need one, so talk it up as an advantage; put three in the box, too - whatever they don't have, we'll offer. And, the beauty of this Ballmer mockup thing is: We can say we were first; how we "lead in slate PCs!" We'll go with an aluminum look for the mock up, but, if it ends up being too far off, we'll change it later based on Apple's exterior look. We'll say we always planned it that way.